Hey Charles,
With the amount of traffic passing through Twitter processing and looking at
our logs for instances were an error occurred is not feasible. I'm more than
happy to help work out the issue you are having though.
What would be really helpful is an example of the base signature string and
post parameters you were trying to send when you got the error, and the same
information for the Tweet before it which worked. I can then take a look and
see if anything jumps out.
Please remember to remove any passwords and consumer or user secrets before
posting.
Best,
Matt
On Mon, Aug 2, 2010 at 5:32 PM, Charles wrote:
> I sent the following to Twitter support via their web form; they
> suggested I should post here instead.
>
> -
> I currently have two automated accounts, thethirdstroke and this one
> (servologyalerts). thethirdstroke tweets every hour on the hour, and
> has been working fine for a long time. I converted it to using OAuth
> a while ago, and it continued to work fine. servologyalerts tweets
> when my nagios installation detects a fault or a fault clears, and has
> been having problems since I switched it from password authentication
> to OAuth on 12 July.
>
> Since that time, most attempts to tweet get the "Something is
> technically wrong" response. However, most test tweets seem to go
> through without any problem, and reviewing the logs I notice that any
> alert which is long enough that my script has to truncate it to 140
> characters before tweeting, and therefore loses (part of) the "packet
> loss = nnn%" which is often at the end of the tweet, goes through
> fine. I wonder if the problem is that my alerts are somehow
> triggering spam filtering, which is then returning a "Something is
> technically wrong" error message rather than actually saying it's spam
> filtering. That doesn't seem a likely explanation, though, as the
> problem started precisely when I switched from basic auth to OAuth -
> surely OAuth would, if anything, need to do *less* spam filtering.
>
> Both automated accounts tweet using the same script, which uses curl
> to post through a python program called oauth-proxy, which I have
> altered to listen only on the loopback interface, and which is started
> up just before each tweet and shut down just afterwards. As
> mentioned, there doesn't seem to be any problem with the OAuth signing
> - thethirdstroke posts fine pretty much all the time, while
> servologyalerts can post test messages and, occasionally, live
> messages with no problems. It also does not seem to be a problem with
> OAuth signing requests containing % signs, as I've posted test
> messages with % signs with no problem.
>
> I'd be grateful if you could check any logs you have and let me know
> if you can see why this problem occurs, and if you can suggest a fix.
> Thanks for your help.
> -
>
> Update: I have temporarily switched back to using basic authentication
> for servologyalerts; the errors have stopped and notifications arrive
> on twitter as expected.
>
> Thanks for any light you can shed; and let me know if more information
> is needed - I didn't think there was any need to copy-and-paste the
> "Something is technically wrong" page's HTML here, for example.
>
--
Matt Harris
Developer Advocate, Twitter
http://twitter.com/themattharris
